“All the rights guaranteed to citizens by the Constitution are worthless, they are a simple bubble, if they are not guaranteed by an independent and virtuous judiciary.”
Andrew Jackson
I don’t know what worries me more, if the defense of President López Obrador of the apparent plagiarism committed by the Minister Yasmín Esquivel or his candor about the reasons why the is defending and promoting his candidacy to the presidency of the Supreme Court.
The president offered yesterday a true confession from part: “Why do you suppose that Yasmín is our candidate? -he said-. Because she has acted with great rectitude and has supported our incursions into the judiciary”.
Righteousness, I don’t know. I, contrary to the president and the very Minister Esquivel, I am willing to admit presumption of innocence, although they have defended the presumption of guilt implicit in the informal preventive detention, with which they seek to punish defendants before they have been tried.
Esquivel has been accused of plagiarizing her 1987 undergraduate thesis. The comparison of the thesis with that of another intern, Edgar Ulises Baez Gutierrez, who submitted his a year earlier, suggests not simple plagiarism but open copying. She says that she began preparing hers a year earlier, but this version of events is hard to believe because it would mean that the current minister would have finished her thesis in 1985 or 1986, which would have been copied by Baez Gutierrez or by someone else, but that she would have kept hers in a drawer without presenting and without making changes to it until 1987. Improbable, although if the presumption of innocence is respected, Esquivel would be innocent as long as his fault was not proven.
Much more worrying is the president’s claim that the minister “has supported our forays into the judiciary.” A minister of the Court must make decisions independently. It would be necessary to suppose that the times in which she has supported the positions of the executive it has been because she independently thought that they were adjusted to the Constitution. The minister’s role is not to support the president’s “incursions” into the judiciary.
The president himself stressed yesterday that Minister Esquivel and her colleague Loretta Ortiz have supported their positions in legal disputes. “When everyone was against the Electricity Law -she declared- she defended our position and everything they want to declare as unconstitutional. What we present she has voted together with Minister Loretta Ortiz and very few, but she has been very consistent She is a woman who agrees with the transformation of the country.”
The function of a minister, however, is not to be consistent with the government or to agree with a political project. Her responsibility in the highest court is to judge the constitutionality or otherwise of government actions.
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The ministers Esquivel and Ortiz have been, indeed, those who have voted the most in favor of the president’s projects. Until now, one could assume that they did so out of conviction, because they thought they were offering a legitimate interpretation of the Constitution, but the president himself exhibits Esquivel by saying that he has been consistent with the government’s positions.
The president himself indicated yesterday that he supports Esquivel because she is his candidate for the presidency of the Court. But a president of the country’s highest court should be distinguished by his independence and legal knowledge, and not just by obeying the president who nominated him for the Court.
Phobia
The president says that Vargas Llosa’s novels bore him and that he is “pleased to see” his “decline.” The government of Mexico also publishes a tweet in which it says that the writer “lost his charm” “because he got into frivolity.” Meanwhile, the French Academy announces that Vargas Llosa will be its first member not to write originally in French.
#candidate